The big problem here for me is, you can't live with and you can't live without YouTube. First of all, it's such a huge collection of the human experience. So much stuff on there that you won't see anywhere else. I'm glad though that more video hosting sites are coming into the picture, but still YT is way ahead in terms of content AFAIK.

Throughout the years of watching stuff on YT, I have made craploads of playlists that I want to return to at some point (and in the meantime, have to an extent, and will return again). It would take years to reconstruct them using another site even if I had access to all the titles and even if they would all be available on other sites (which they won't). I could start downloading all these thousands of videos but that would take up way too much space and time.

In my Gmail inbox, so much stuff I would perhaps want to look up some day (old conversations and so on, especially for when I'm much older and I'd like to reminisce about conversations I had with old friends or girlfriends). Google certainly has my number. (I suppose those are easier to download but it's still a heck of a lot of content.)

Anyway, the channel with all the craploads of playlists also has a bunch of crappy music videos that I'm only comfortable with for strangers and very close friends to see. Some of the playlists are about topics that I don't want some people to know about (religious debates or whatever, or the fact that on occasion, I like to watch professional wrestling, or videos with sexy content, etc.). Point is, for various reasons one would like to stay anonymous and that should be respected. If I make a comment on a video like that I would want to be able to do so anonymously as well (anonymous in the sense that you use a name of your choice and not your real-life name). Now it is simply impossible because that account is linked to my Google account which I use for my Gmail (personal and professional use) and that account has my real name. I would like my real name to stay on my Google account (for professional reasons) but keep using an anonymous name for my YT account. Not possible anymore, so unless they change it, I can NEVER make a single comment ever again, not even to say thank you if someone says great job on one of my music videos.

This forced integration of personal/entertainment Internet space and professional/public Internet space is truly insidious and harmful. We are being encouraged to NOT be careful with our private data online and that WILL lead to much more harm in the future.

I would love to support alternative video hosting sites but the fact remains that in the foreseeable future, YouTube is here to stay and dominate, and we just have to deal with it while trying to figure out how we as the user base can turn this behemoth of a ship that is Google around to face in a slightly better direction.

One bright spark in the whole story is that on Firefox I have an alternative channel linked to my Yahoo account (I use Gmail on Chrome) on which I don't have my full name. That one is my gaming channel which contains a number of awesome speed runs. ;)

Of course, we'll see how things go with the idiotic idea of banning gameplay footage. Taking in mind the depths to which Google has stooped already, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd actually implement that.

Good lord, I've never seen him this angry. You piss off a guy called Angry Joe and you know it's gonna get ugly. Besides, he literally lost his job and years of work is down the drain because of this stupid flagging system.

I wrote:

Let's make this a big thing on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, everywhere. I don't know if Joe can earn money of other services such as Vimeo or Dailymotion but if he migrates let's make sure lots of others follow and support him. Hashtags #angryjoeshow #NoGooglePlus #nogoogleplusonyoutube

If people can manage to boycott Google in some way en masse, by hosting their videos on other sites, using other search engines, etc. then perhaps their dimwit bosses will get some kind of message. There needs to be some kind of organised, concerted effort. Most probably it won't make a dent but I really think that something ought to be done.

It's not just LPers, dingus, it's anybody that uses a clip/soundbite/sample from popular media. This system completely fucks over anybody using media under fair use. That's right, the system is actually flagging people who use clips from trailers, media that is made for distribution. It's a robot that doesn't know shit besides scanning videos for Warner Bros. or Disney clips and flagging them for deletion without any prejudiced.

The system is fucked and it's going to affect every content provider that utilities fair use, regardless if they are even making money from their videos.

Avoozl said:
Well that's the thing, they don't want anyone making money while using anything from media I guess.

No, they shot themselves in the foot. Like Joe pointed out, the studio behind Tomb Raider is not going to flag a video of them conducting interviews to promote their game. It's retarded logic to ban content studios themselves release for people to promote their games.

This situation has been brought to us by Google and major media conglomerates coming to the realization there is no way humanly possible to monitor every video to see if it's breaking fair use. So instead they decided to eat their own tail and carpet bomb their own promoters to get at the copyright violators who probably don't even run ads on their videos.

AndrewB
I would commit first degree murder and then fabricate evidence to make it look like self defense.

Posts: 5638
Registered: 12-99

I went ahead and agreed to use my real name. I then changed my "real name" on my empty G+ account to Ural Damasis and my picture to an alpaca. This changes my Gmail from: name, and so I went into Gmail settings and changed my sendto to use a custom name, which is my real name. All is good.

Everything he said is pretty much what ebay did. You can read about it in many ecommerce bytes blog COMMENTS (not the stupid articles but the non shill comments, and there are a lot of shills). Fascism is organizing. They want everyone so poor that they become politically impotent, reduced to desperately finding crumbs to eat 24 hours a day. Big centralized systems are using first mover advantage and selectively enforced regulations to monopolize and shut down competition. The corporation is the new tyranny, after users build it it cannibalizes them, changing from win/win to win/lose. With all the fascism and information war, this could be an organized plan to destroy america, possibly with the goal of coming back later and buying everything up for pennies on the dollar. WWIII is being very covert so far.

The issue at hand is whether an LP constitutes "Fair Use" or not. Considering that the actual law defines "brief excerpts" as fair use and not anything extended, it means that most LPs technically violate Fair Use and can be flagged.

Think of it like this: It's the same reason that MST3K had to buy the rights to the movies they'd lambast. Even though "commentary" falls under Fair Use, LPs as commentary is a huge grey area.

I'll be honest I really don't care about Angry Joe. I have watched his videos off and on, but in terms of people who making gaming videos he's pretty low on my list. I'm more saddened by the fact that this whole copyright mess is one of the main reasons Mark from Classic Game Room is leaving Youtube. I just hope he can make it on his own.

That guy presents a really good point. A film's commodity lies in it's viewing. A song's commodity lies in it's listening. A game's commodity lies in it's playing. No matter how many LPs I watch, I'll never get what the medium is actually trying to sell to me; it's game play.

Nintendo and Sega don't really get this. I can watch a game from start to finish, but never actually enjoy what the game is, unlike watching a movie or listening to a song online. I may get the storyline, but I'll never actually get the excitement of playing the game. If an LPers is having fun, I'll still buy the game to have fun myself.

Honestly, this whole LP scene got many younger people interested enough in classic games to support the virtual console. Do you think a lot of new gamers have the nostalgia itch to go and pay for these games again? No. It's the new internet gaming "culture" (I think I threw up a little) that generates a lot of interest in these companies back catalog.

Mr. Freeze said:
The issue at hand is whether an LP constitutes "Fair Use" or not. Considering that the actual law defines "brief excerpts" as fair use and not anything extended, it means that most LPs technically violate Fair Use and can be flagged.

Again, like that metal guy pointed out, it's not really the game play footage that is getting flagged. I think the argument lies in the game's music. I think that's where they feel justified enough to make a DMC claim. Game companies probably realize the futility of arguing semantics with game play and will instead focus on music and video found in games.

And now a word from Alex Jones: "All i know is that they've made a conscious decision to basically engage in systematic institutional fraud to take over the entire civilization in an act of economic conquest. But I don't know how the power structure thinks they're going to escape the blowback, in a culture and society they live in, of something this degrading. I mean the rules of nature, and nature's god, show that they will end up being torn limb from limb, probably physically for what they've done, but undoubtedly culturally."

Youtube is a microscosm of human life. The big guys at the top get bigger and richer and the small guys mumble and complain while having the occasional 'revolution'.

Look at the world today. What's different in the social structure (generally speaking) between now and a hundred years ago? Not a lot. Rich people are the tiny minority with all the power and the plebs are the vast majority with the illusion of freedom and very little to no power... Like I say, it's just life.

People will decry Youtube and foresee it's impending doom (no pun intended) but Youtube will carry on in one guise or another (at least the guys at the top will) and everyone will carry on watching...

I'm one of the few people that's fine with the copyrights, especially the music ones. Youtube is keeping itself from being sued. The poor video game composers that don't make nearly as much money as other musicians that get money for licensing their music not to mention profits from being on CDs. People use video game music in the background of videos.

There was some guy on Youtube complaining how his commentary over a trailer that was pulled. He said it was his original work over the trailer and not the trailer that was getting visitors. I can't believe he'd be so petty to bitch about 2 minutes of work yammering over a trailer. What about the money that would benefit a company for their own youtube site and the money and time it took to make the video that they won't be making it back. Woops its promotion to have an idiot talking over it. I'd be ok with vlogs talking about the trailer. Kind of like there are TV review vlogs that don't have any footage or music.

Also I've always thought Youtube if fucked up when I can just go and listen to a CD on Youtube. How is that legal? Oh and at least with TV shows and movies that appear on Youtube, eventually they get taken down.

No matter how many LPs I watch, I'll never get what the medium is actually trying to sell to me; it's game play.

I've watched The Walking Dead, all Uncharteds, and the Last of Us playthroughs on Youtube, had a good time. These particular games have gameplay that would be uninteresting to me (stuff that has been done before, sometimes better, and is ultimately devoid of intellectual challenge, only twitch skill and repetition) as the player but are enjoyable as an observer (cool animations or sound effects, and seeing someone play competently everything can look seamless). So I got entertainment out of this and I'll never pay the companies for these games, and the Let's Player gets paid for essentially removing a sale chance.

Outside of examples that may or may not be fringe cases, whether the argument games are about gameplay commercially holds true is highly debatable, given all those "movies as games" topping the charts and the press openly promoting storytelling over anything else.

I watch Youtube on PS3 and it always recommends LPs. I just can't watch them. It feels like such a waste of time. BUTTTTTT the only reason why I will watch a LP is to find a way through a map, how to solve a situation. I can't imagine watching 9 hours of LP for the personality of the player. Is he just that funny to WATCH 9 hours? Why do I need to watch when they can make a podcast of it and I can listen as I work?

I don't see the appeal of Lets Plays either. It's always some loud asshole talking about banal shit set to the visuals of sucking at videogames. Yeah I'm generalizing, but I've seen like, 3 LPs that break that trend. Why would someone want to watch their friend play videogames, but its over the internet and they don't know you?

True. I can't help thinking though that earning money of YouTube videos was never meant to be a first-stream income, similar to the Amazon Mechanical Turk, for example. It's an environment where Google makes and changes the rules and you don't have much of a say in it, if anything.

Let's see:
- People who don't build their career around one specific private company, for starters. Not the smartest idea even when you work directly for said company.
- People who have skills in high demand or decent connections (a new job is then a few phone calls away).
- People who are able to adapt and draw general knowledge from specific experiences on their previous jobs (which you can then apply to a multitude of new jobs).
- People who don't get tied down in debt for the sake of buying the latest HDTV, mobile phone and tablet and so have some flexibility when it comes to income (as in, can drop down a paygrade or two, at least for a while).
- People who stay proactive and keep learning stuff on their free time.
- and obviously, people with a bunch of money.

That's not to say it's your fault if you have all your eggs in one basket. Maybe your dad gets cancer, maybe you get in a car accident, maybe you just climbed out of poverty. Certain things are out of our control. Still, for people lucky enough not to be in these situations there's many steps they can take to ensure their financial stability, and any responsible adult should have a fallback plan for the eventual catastrophe in their life.